Information Sciences: an International Journal
Evaluation of an Automatic Extension of Temporal Expression Treatment to Catalan
CICLing '07 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing
Multilingual extension of a temporal expression normalizer using annotated corpora
CrossLangInduction '06 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Cross-Language Knowledge Induction
From Semantic Roles to Temporal Information Representation
MICAI '09 Proceedings of the 8th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
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This paper is concerned with the identification of two semantically close categories - temporal locating adverbials and time-denoting expressions. The dividing line between these categories is difficult to draw, inasmuch as there are several phrases that occur with the same surface form in the typical contexts of both of them (e.g. in adverbial position and as the complement of verbs like to date from). These ambivalent phrases include relatively simple expressions like yesterday or last week, but also - a fact that has gone practically unnoticed in the literature - structurally complex ones, like those headed by before, after, when or ago. In this paper, a uniform semantic categorisation of these phrases as mere time-denoting expressions is advocated and some of its consequences for the grammatical system are assessed. The analysis postulates a null locating preposition (with a value close to that of in) in the contexts where the ambivalent forms occur adverbially. A corollary is the partition of the set of particles traditionally classified as temporal locating into two sets: the truly locating ones - like in, during, since or until - and those that are mere heads of (structurally complex) time-denoting expressions - like before, after, between, when, ago, or from.